The Prodigal
by Nexus Six
Summary: The tale of Roy, from his escape from slavery to his death. Meet the other two replicants mentioned in the movie. Rated T for language, violence, sensuality
1. Chapter 1

Chapter 1: The Fall

It was dark in the cabin with my comrades. We'd turned off the lights so that the officers would assume we were observing curfew; and the only illumination came from the pale stars, shining through the small thick window mounted high on one of those walls.

Lounging about in the shadows, my friends leaned on one another like old forgotten dolls in an attic, slumped and silent and content. Pris, her face very pale, was curled up beside me, her head resting on my shoulder. She felt warm next to me, and I savored her nearness. Though her eyes were almost closed, slivers of pupil and iris glittered, near eclipsed by her lashes, and for a moment glinted red.

The order of the day had been battle. It was a big one, a real mother. All of us who'd been in combat were worse for wear. I had just returned from having my arm sewed back on (Painful experience, that, not one I'd recommend-- unless, of course, in the case of loss of limb, which I do not endorse under any circumstances, expect perhaps for someone I don't like very much at all). Even now, underneath the bandages, my bioengineered flesh was reknitting, muscles binding, bones fusing once more. We heal fast, and without scars.

Leon and Jack were nursing wounds of their own, somewhat less radical than mine but debilitating nevertheless. Zorah, Pris, and Mary were tired out from their own work. Women were assigned different jobs. They didn't do combat. Mary was a nurse. Zorah did special ops, mostly assassinations. And Pris… well, Pris had the difficult (and, to here her tell it, very strenuous) job of keeping the officers happy. Thus, though we were all normally on the same ship together, Jack, Leon and I got to interact with the opposite sex only rarely. We wouldn't have held this meeting under such conditions in a million years except that this was the night of the week that we were allowed to see the girls. And, well, we didn't have a million years.

All the same, I would have preferred to make my pitch to them at a time when they were fresher. Dead on their feet, they wouldn't hear my words. Dead on mine, however, I could still be damn persuasive. _Come on._ I gave myself a mental pat on the shoulder. _Use that weakness to your advantage!_

I stretched my arms behind my back, looking slowly around at my audience, and cleared my throat slightly, with a smile. "So, about making a break for it. . ."

There was a loud collective groan at hearing these words out of my mouth yet again. Someone, I think it was Jack, laughed; and Pris took a good-natured swat at me. I caught at her wrist, my reflexes elastic, and kissed her fingertips. "I'm serious," I said, attempting to keep my voice casual. "I think we'd better give it a go. See what freedom is."

"Get real," Zorah drawled. "I guess you have a death wish, Batty, but none of the rest of us do."

My lips curved faintly with the irony of it: I, a death wish! What I wanted was life, eternal, unlimited and free. At least, I thought I did, though I couldn't quite say, having never truly experienced living. This half-existence they granted us here, among the stars, floating forever, let us know more of dying than it had of life. I don't just mean the killing. The killing was all right. Sometimes, even, it was good. I'm talking about the drifting. In the deep blackness, I had often thought that this must be where real people go where they die. I existed in the bleakness of heaven. When I ended I had no idea where I would go. I hadn't bothered to figure it out. I didn't like to think of ending.

These thoughts flickered through my head in an instant, like the lightening blaze of a laser bolt. Time to put my cards on the table; let them know what I knew. I felt my expression becoming more serious.

"I have a life-wish," I corrected Zorah. "Obviously more than the rest of you, because if you wanted to stay alive as badly as I do, you would have looked for what I found."

I opened the locker by my cot and pulled out the print-ups, spreading them across the floor for the others to all see. "I finally got into our records."

There was a gasp at this. The others crowded round, snatching at the papers with their names and numbers, scanning lines anxiously for information. Leon squinted at his, his lips moving slowly as he sounded out words. He'd never been a very good reader. I didn't pick up mine. I already knew what was on it.

"If you look you'll see how dearly you'll pay for losing track of your precious time," I said loudly and a little harshly.

They were looking, all right. Like me, they didn't like what they saw. Pris let out a gasp, and her fingers flew to her mouth. Jack swore. Mary trembled slightly as she put her paper down and sat with her eyes fixed dreamily on the middle distance. Zorah hissed under her breath. And Leon just kept staring at the page, as if he trusted that if he looked long enough the words would resolve themselves into something different, a kinder destiny.

"Well?" I said sharply, fiercely, "What did I tell ya?"

Pris' eyes were filled with tears as she looked at me, but she managed a wobbly smile. "It says I have two months," she stammered.

I was moved by some strange feeling, vague, confused and troubling, as I looked back at her. Feelings. We didn't used to have them, not like this. If something hurt, it hurt. If we wanted something, we wanted it, if we got it, we were happy. It was simple. Through the years, the years that passed by so fast without us noticing, they'd become a little less elementary. Pain was no longer a matter of cut-me-and-I-bleed.

Sometimes I'd find myself imagining I could feel other people's wounds. Their fear. I could almost understand Pris'. If it was anything like mine, she was drowning in it.

I took her hand. "Yes," I said more softly. "Time flies, doesn't it?" Anger mounted in me as I thought of what I'd been made. Perfection embodied, with a shelf life of four years! Four years, to keep me from ever realizing fully my potential, from growing beyond control, from surpassing my creators. People were sick. Had to be, to create something like me. Once, when men made perfection, they cut it in stone, so it would be eternal, would live down the centuries. Some of these still stood: the sphinxes, the Pieta. I was a finite work of art.

"Is anyone interested now in listening to what I have to say?" I asked.

Heads lifted, five pairs of red-glinting eyes gazed at me. Each of my friends slowly nodded. I smiled and leaned forward.

"Very good," I murmured. "Then we'll have to start making plans."

Amazing what you can accomplish when you use your head. I used mine and set our deadlines. I wanted to be ready to go in three days. Mary persuaded me that I'd better be generous and allow us five, but we made such good time once we'd designated tasks that we were more than prepared by the time I wanted us to be.

To Mary, the only other member of our party that was mental grade A, I gave the task of research. Pris I put in charge of disguise, because I knew she'd like it, and she'd be next to useless to me if I didn't give her something to take her mind off her worry (Poor Pris. The only one of us with less time to waste was I). To Leon I gave the duty of standing guard whenever any of us meet to exchange information and otherwise conspire. Jack handled money matters and looked up places for us to stay; Zorah was in charge of arranging things for the getaway. I didn't have much more to do than cool my heels – the sometimes-privilege of a leader.

Day three was perfect not only because the time span satisfied my impatience, but because it was leave. For the officers – the people, that is. Not us. Never us.

The evening found Pris and I holed up in the cabin of the fleet's admiral, to which she had been sent to carry out her, ah, duties. I, of course, was not usually her coworker. Tonight, we'd give the old bastard quite the double act when he came in for his pleasure.

"While the cat is away, the mice will play," I whispered to Pris, and ran my hand down her graceful back to her gently flaring hips.

She giggled, and turning, smiled radiantly up at me. "How do I look?" She asked.

Pris, with her dandelion hair, doll-like face, and a figure that was almost aerodynamic in its sleekness, could never pass for human under close inspection. But at maybe ten paces she would do. To downplay her perfection she'd dressed in a frowsy, flyaway fashion, wearing a large, bulky coat draped over her trim shoulders and an ugly little brown hat on her head. Her smile, underneath its rakish brim, was angelic. She'd stolen the clothes from an officer's girlfriend's suitcase, and they didn't fit her well. I bent down and kissed her, sliding my tongue between her soft, warm lips. Her mouth tasted sweet.

Pris and I were the perfect pair. Physically we were beautifully compatible. Both of us liked it romantic and a little bit dirty – or dirty and a little romantic. I think it might have been the latter. While she wasn't intellectually quite up to my par (being only mental level B, while I was A) she was definitely smart. Probably it was her lack of any kind of attention span that did it, but at any rate, it was a trait I found charming.

"You look wicked," I told her.

"Like a human?" She tossed her head and smirked.

My smile faded. "Never that."

Regarding my dim reflection in the mirror, I watched my own brow wrinkle up slightly with concern. Forget Pris passing, at least she didn't loom six feet and seven inches tall. Even out of uniform, in the stolen clothes Pris found for me, there was no making me unobtrusive. I'd look like a colossus in a group of real people, turning heads wherever I went. The task seemed suddenly impossible.

I could see my face freeze with resolution; the lopsided smile returning to my lips, the light to my pale blue eyes, as I reminded myself that this was too important not to work.

"What's he like?" I asked absently, now tracing my own features in the mirror with one finger.

Pris, bending over to pick up a hairbrush she'd caught, twisted her head around to look at me in a contortion no human being could ever have accomplished. "You mean the admiral?" She scowled a little. "You know. Fat. Ugly. And always, always –"

She didn't finish her sentence. There were footsteps in the hallway. We both froze a little. I felt my heart racing, furiously pumping a rush of blood to my head. Combat.

Pris gave me a funny little smile. "Roy," she whispered. "You better hide."

I nodded and slid underneath the bed.

The door creaked open. I saw Pris' beige high heels pause in mid step and swivel towards it. A pair of flabby ankles entered.

"Hullo, Admiral," Pris said brightly.

Contented wheezing. Noises of someone taking off his coat. "Ah, Pris. Been playing dress-up, eh? Glad to see me tonight? You ready to play?"

The bed creaked as Pris murmured in the affirmative. I slid my shirt off, wound it tightly into a rope, and pulled it taut between my hands, and emerged.

"I don't think so," I said pleasantly to the admiral's hideous, astounded face. "Tonight, you're playing with me."

I gave him time to gawk and get his gun out. And I let him get one shot in. It wouldn't have been fair otherwise. I didn't expect him to blood me. The bullet only grazed my ribs, but it was enough to make me furious. In an instant I was on him, knocking the pistol from his grip, twisting the cloth around his neck. He made a feeble protesting choking sound and wriggled a little. His bloated, blotchy hands clenched over mine, but their grip was weak. I stared coldly into his dull, shocked eyes as I gave a final vicious wrench. Bone snapped. He crumpled. A bad smell filled the room as his intestines failed. Then it was all over. The old bugger barely had the balls to fight for his life.

I regarded him as he lay there, and suppressed a flicker of envy. Old. It was an unattractive thing, and from what I'd heard unpleasant, but I would have given my right hand to be able to one day experience it.

Pris was sitting up on the bed, her eyes big and round as she stared up at me, hugging a pillow to her chest. Her hair was disheveled and her blouse part-way undone. She didn't look remotely frightened, rather exhilarated. Her eyes were bright, her cheeks flushed, lips parted, and she gazed at me with open admiration. I leaned down and kissed her on the mouth. Her fingers wound in my hair.

"We have to go," I said firmly, taking her gently by the wrists and pushing her away.

She nodded, then gave a start. "You're bleeding!" She exclaimed, seeing her fingers smeared with scarlet.

I winced. "Just the dear admiral's parting shot. Doesn't hurt," I lied. "Help me get changed."

It took some doing, but within about five minutes we had forced me into one of the admiral's uniforms, ripped off the insignia of his rank, and added a long trench coat and a hat, as if I was an officer going out on the town.

"You still don't look right," Pris fussed, attempting to straighten the too-small uniform on my frame.

"It doesn't matter," I snapped. "His shuttle is leaving in forty five minutes. We'll need to hustle."

"I wonder if Zorah and Jack and Leon kept up their end of things," Pris was now struggling with the combination on the admiral's safe. "Roy, would you. . . ?"

I could have cracked the code easily, but we were pressed for time. I opted for a more efficient if less elegant route. Lifting the safe with only a slight effort – it wasn't too heavy for me of itself, and its contents were only paper money – I smashed it forcefully to the floor. Noisy, but effective. And the admiral's lovely job of soundproofing his quarters left me with little to worry about. Dollars spilled out in a flood.

"Thanks!" Pris commenced cramming the bills into a suitcase.

The door burst open, admitting Zorah. There was blood on her face and her arms, sticky and dripping. "Roy, you better not be fucking around in here. We don't have time to smell the god damn flowers!" Her tone was urgent.

I gestured to the prone admiral. She smiled. Leon poked his head around the door and sniffed distastefully at the smell. "Looks like you did a cleaner job than me," Zorah observed.

"Point to you for using your hands," I said, tossing her a towel to wipe up with. "Where's Mary and Jack?"

"They're already out. At the dock by this time, shouldn't wonder. Come on!"

I nodded, grabbed Pris, and stepped into the hall.

Leon, tall and sullen and surprisingly the most convincingly human of the lot of us, gave me a nod from the shadows. I looked at his uniform and ascertained that I'd have to treat him as my superior. My crisp salute made him blink, and I smirked. Never too quick on the uptake, old Leon.

"Get your hands dirty, boy?" I asked him.

He licked his lips nervously, a gesture which in this context was even more unsettling, I suppose, than usual. "Yeah. They're cleaned up now, though."

Zorah gave a startling war whoop from behind us. I looked down the hall and saw what she'd seen – the approaching human officers coming towards us with suspicious expressions on their faces. Adrenaline already pumping through my blood made me want to do something stupid. I shot a sidelong look at Leon.

"Thinking what I'm thinking?" I raised my eyebrows.

He licked his lips again and nodded. "Yeah."

"Do we try to pass...?" Pris, out of the loop, queried.

Zorah took a look at us and divined our intention. "The boys don't want to play nice. Come on, we're busting out of here."

When we arrived at the commercial dock twenty minutes later and looked for Mary and Jack, boarding was already in progress. It was late at night and the flight attendants were yawning. We hung back to the end of the line as Zorah excused herself to the lady's room to eradicate a bloodspot she'd missed. A woman ahead of us in line stared sympathetically after her, doubtless assuming the stain in Zorah's pants was due to her monthly cycle. Pris giggled, and my lips curved up with the irony. No pesky periods for replicants to deal with. No reproduction, no PMS. We were lucky, by all accounts. I still felt a pang, thinking what it would be to have a son who had Pris' eyes.

Jack accosted me with a glint in his eyes. "Six," he said. I didn't have to ask him of what.

"Eight," I countered, allowing myself only the smugness to which a warrior is entitled.

He looked irked that my corpse count exceeded his, and had nothing more to say to me for a full five minutes after that.

Jack, though not much younger than the rest of us, is just a boy at heart. An impetuous, cocky, volatile boy, vain about his looks and cynical in philosophy, who treated me with equal parts hero worship, competitiveness, and disdain. The disdain was for my idealism, passion, and authority. The hero worship, though little he realized it, was pretty much for the same.

Mary, standing a little apart from us, looked indulgent and a little bit nauseous. I can't quite explain how a lady like Mary wound up with a boy like Jack. Her intelligence was keen, her sensibilities ridiculously delicate. She often made me absolutely furious. Something about her – I suppose humans would call it empathy – had developed and refined a little too much. Perhaps it was her function as a nurse that did it, though to my thinking a sick bay was no place for squeamishness. Consequentially what I hated in her was what I hated in humans – this thing, condescending, naive and cloying, which supposedly made them feel for others. If they could really feel such a thing as another being's suffering, how could they have created us?

Zorah returned just as we came to the front of the line. A tired woman in a blue uniform smiled wanly at us and asked for our tickets. I smiled down at her. A cold, hard, very unpleasant smile. I said nothing at all.

"Tickets?" She repeated herself, a little annoyed.

I spread my hands for her to see. "We don't have any."

She was getting really irritated. "Then you're wasting your time, and mine," she snapped.

I smiled still more broadly, and slowly shook my head. "Time?" I murmured. "Believe me, I wouldn't waste my time. And as for yours, it's just about run out."

Humans think so slowly. As she stepped backwards and reached slowly for her intercom, I could tell she was considering calling security. Thinking isn't doing. Leon was already in motion. As she backed up, she found herself trapped in his loving arms.

"Time to die," he leered, and snapped her neck. She dropped noiselessly to the floor, head lolling.

I glanced behind us to be sure there were no witnesses to the deed, then stepped over the body. The others followed, except for Mary, who lingered, her expression closed-off and unreadable, her spun-gold hair making a halo around her face. Jack grabbed her by the arm and dragged her after us. Pris, smiling mischievously, grabbed the attendant's headset as she passed and put it on.

As we stepped onto the shuttle, Pris fiddled with the switches of the microphone until a tiny buzz of static signaled it was live. Then, raising her voice and giving it a gooey, friendly tone, she started to approximate one of the cloying speeches she had doubtless heard before while on a commercial shuttle with one of the officers.

"Good evening and welcome aboard. Thanks for choosing us as your option for interplanetary travel. Our attendants will be going over safety procedures in a brief demonstration. We'd like to ask you, in the case of an actual emergency, to, above all, not panic..."

I nodded to Jack. As she continued talking, pointing out emergency exits, he slipped into the cockpit and disappeared. He returned moments later with a couple of machine guns and a smirk like the cat that ate the canary. Mary, faint green by now, went into the pit herself to take the late pilot's place. Our choreography thus perfectly orchestrated, Leon and I each took a gun and we slipped into the main cabin where the rows of human passengers, practically atrophied with apathy, sat with their noses in magazines and headphones on their ears. A few looked up disinterestedly as we came in, with boredom quickly shattered by terror as they saw our weapons and the looks on our faces.

Pris giggled tinnily over the PA system. "... But actually that's just bullshit," she admitted, reverting to her usual tone, "Because this isn't a routine flight run at all. It's not a normal military inspection either. This is a hijacking. We are military grade Nexus 6 replicants with guns and we would like your cooperation. You have sixty seconds to evacuate this ship, after which we start playing rough. If anybody decides they want to be a hero, I can't promise Roy and Leon won't get angry. So remember what I said about the exits before, and try not to panic. Have a nice day, everybody!" The system crackled as her voice went out.

People, as mentioned above, are stupid. In spite of

Pris' very good advice, there was a stampede. The passengers crammed towards the nearest doors, frantically seeking escape like lobsters dropped into a pot of hot water. It took several minutes of waving our guns around to make everyone be quiet and good, and it took Zorah giving instructions to make them figure out how to open the damned emergency exit door. But ultimately all would have gone with perfect clockwork smoothness-- if not for the man who made himself a martyr.

Anyone who gets a pistol through security – who isn't, you know, security himself, that is – has my grudging respect. But no one who gets vast numbers of his own kind killed deserves anything less than a painful demise. The man who put a gun to Zorah's head about halfway through the evacuation procedure was one of an elite breed only found among the human species which is often referred to as the idiot. She snarled as he grabbed her around the neck, resting his gun's muzzle against her brow, but went still when she saw he had a bullet with her name on it. His eyes were wild and his tone shrill as he stared around him, breathless with disbelief in his success and smugness at his own insolence.

"It's all right now, I got a gun on one! Any of you other move, and I shoot the lady!"

He thought just because Zorah was woman-shaped, he could hold her. That's how stupid he was, and how cowardly. Her elbow in his ribs didn't just knock the wind out of him, it stopped his breath for good.

That was when there was a real panic, and we had to start shooting.

It was a messy cleanup. The only moment in it that turned my stomach was when I flipped a very small corpse over and realized I had killed a little girl. I felt my blood freeze as I stared at the tiny, still face, and my guts lurched like they were struggling to turn inside out. She was maybe four years old. My age. She didn't even get the life I had. She'd still been fragile and helpless and ignorant and nearsighted about the future, still at the whim of others. She'd never jumped to light speed, I'd bet, or felt herself become a streak of brightness during a wormhole jump. She'd never really been kissed. And she was totally helpless when one of us – was it I?-- gunned her down in her infancy.

I raced to the bathroom, and really did turn my guts inside out. Shocked at my weakness, shocked at my sentimentality all the while as I vomited. I'd made an error, that was all. I'd killed an animal. An animal that would have grown up just as mean and small-minded and nasty as all the rest, doubtless. Why did I feel like such a monster?

Because I was. Monster. One step up from an animal.

Mary was leaning in the doorway when I finally resurfaced. Her face was pale with her, her lips tight, her arms folded; and she was shaking. She could only control her rage with sarcastic false-sweetness. "Well, Roy, are you satisfied now? Are you happy now? Do you feel like a real warrior? Had enough yet? Do you feel proud of yourself?"

I lifted my head, which I had been leaned against the toilet bowl as if it was the breast of a lover. I felt my lips setting into a crooked, angry, hateful smile.

I finally had to laugh.

"Proud of myself?" I spat, with poisonous irony. "How can I be?" Forcing myself to stand, I straightened up and took a look at my face – pale, blue-eyed, its handsomeness the perfection of that twisted human ideal called Aryan. "How can I be proud?" I repeated. "I'm only what they've made."


	2. Chapter 2

Chapter 2 The Quality Of Mercy

The shuttle slid like a knife between the stars. Under the guidance of Jack's smooth, capable hands we wove through the wide, empty spaces of the Saint Dane asteroid belt, pushing but not quite bumping up against the outer limits of the ship's capacity for speed. I stood leaning in the door to the cockpit, breathing deeply, slowly. Exhausted by all of our close calls, I was simply satisfied to be alive.

Zorah had slumped onto the floor and was now leaning against a wall with her long legs crossed, enjoying a cigarette. The a thin wreath of vapor surrounded her face, the perfect halo for a fallen angel. She'd kicked off her shoes, and Leon tripped over them as he made his way into the room. She smirked at him and puffed smoke up into his bewildered face.

"How ya doing, tiger?" She asked jauntily.

Leon's face grew very red and he stammered something less than coherant. I raised my eyebrows very slightly at Pris, who was leaning over Jack's shoulder trying to see how piloting was done, and she giggled silently with me. Even Mary's lips were moved into the shadow of a smile. There was no ridicule in it, though. We were all too goddamned happy to snipe. And why not! We were free-- for the first time in our too short lives, free! The realization sang through me like a bullet through the air. Yes, I was no longer held by the chains in which I had been born!

No resting on my laurels. Not yet. Not ever. Never time enough to rest! "Good work," I remarked from the door. "Better not get complacent, though. If they're any good, they'll be right on our tail."

"They're no good without us," Jack said confidantly, his face one huge grin.

"Correction," Zorah drawled, stubbing out her cigarette onto her arm with total nonchalance, "They're not good without people _like_ us."

"People?" Pris gave an airy, derisive laugh. "What a joke!"

"Joke?" I shot her a hard look. "Not us. You know what Tyrell Corporation's slogan is, don't you?" All but Mary shook their heads, she simply stared at me with an expression of utter pathos, still looking like the bloody mask of tragedy.

"'More human than human,'" I whispered. Four pairs of eyes glowed fiery at the words. I wouldn't have been surprised if mine too were burning. Mary's eyelids closed in an involuntary flinch.

"Think about what it means," I recommended. "It's true, those humans are no good without us-- that's the joke! We're simply better at anything that they could do. Which means that they'll be sending more of our own kind after us."

"Do you really think they would trust the Nexus 6 to hunt down its own?" Mary asked sharply.

I regarded her coldly. "They'd better-- nothing else can."

She stepped closer to me, looked up into my face. What she saw there seemed to frighten or sadden her, or perhaps fill her with disgust, because she averted her eyes. "You know, one time," she murmured, "Some very wise people had a word for the sin of raising themselves above their creators. They called it hubris."

For a second I was taken aback. Then I lashed back at her with my laughter. Taking her by the shoulders, I hissed: "You're so very wise, Mary- so literate. If you'd obeyed your creators and toed the line, you wouldn't have read all those bloody books of yours in the first place. I could say a lot of things. But what comes to mind right now is that if that's the way you feel about our rising up, you're welcome to walk all the way home!"

Her chin lifted, she gave me look for look, but she was shaking. "I'm not afraid of you, Roy," she said it low and coldly. "But you have your devils, and you have to realize--"

The philosophical discussion was halted by Jack's fist, which imposed itself between us. The side of my jaw stung. I whirled on him with bared teeth, combat instincts screaming inside me like sirens. Leon and Zorah couldn't hold me back, it took Pris' delicate arms around my neck to bring me back to myself. I shook them all off and walked determinedly to the pilot's place, not sparing a glance for Jack.

"There," I said, pointing at the screen, where a tiny green triangle was gaining slowly but surely on an even smaller red one. "That's what we get for wasting our time with bickering. So instead of dealing with more foolish displays like that in the future--" my tone was withering, and Jack growled deep in his throat, chafing against Mary's hand on his arm-- "I suggest we agree from now on to function as a unit."

"With you as the Captain, yeah, Roy?" Jack spat out.

I met his eyes icily. "Let us take a vote. Either I as the only qualified combat pilot sit down in that chair right now, or we take our chances and hope that the Nexus 6 really _can't _be trusted to raise a hand against his brothers."

Jack was shamed into silence. A show of hands wasn't even necessary. I sat myself down, flexed my fingers, and took ahold of the flight controls. As my hand clenched around the joystick, however, I felt it violently and painfully spasm. At the time, I hardly gave it a thought. All my mind focused on manuvering the ship through space.

"Should we try to contact them?" Pris asked, rather tensely. I growled under my breath to indicate that silence was required and kept my eyes on the screen, my mind on the problem. Firing back was out of the question, obviously-- the commercial jet ship wasn't even armed. There were several courses of action to be considered nevertheless. Since we couldn't out-gun them, we could try to outrun them, although that didn't seem like a very wise or feasible course of action considering the all around superiority of their rig. The smartest thing to do would probably have been to let them board and then try to kill them and take their ship. Yet I balked at the idea of assaulting my own kind. My anger with Jack inspired me, within just moments, to do something reckless.

Flexing my fingers over the control board, I sought out a button and pushed it. Several lights along the cabin flickered out. I punched another button, and another. Near complete darkness fell.

"Roy!" Mary shrieked. "What are you doing?"

I gritted my teeth in a grin. "I'm turning off almost everything so that we show up in their computers as little as possible. We're gonna drift for a minute."

"Are you crazy, Roy?" Zorah's voice rose out of her natural cool alto. "They'll see us drop of their monitors and they'll know what happened!"

My intellect, of course, said she was right, but something else was telling me to go ahead with the scheme-- instinct, or intuition. I flicked another switch, completing the black. Only the controls glowed now. "Grab yourselfs tanks," I said. "I'm gonna kill the oxygen generators for a few minutes. And hold on to something, because we won't have gravity either."

I gave them a few seconds to get ready, grabbed a mask, then killed the engines. They gave up the ghost with a long, low, dispirited whine. Mechanical death. It made me shudder. I gripped the back of the chair and floated horizontally, waiting, one hand clasping the breath mask over my mouth. Nice thing about these masks, I reflected-- they really discouraged conversation. If you can't talk, you can't criticize. I was glad to be free of distractions while I watched the monitor.

The battleship cruised along majestically. It wasn't a huge model, but it was big enough-- a nice, manueverable type. I'd piloted one of those once, and I can tell you it had it head and shoulders over this flying junkyard. Floating in the dark, waiting, I watched it glide along, searching blindly with little concern. Past stars, past asteroids, past. . . us.

I let out my breath and waited for a few more moments before turning on the power again; first the oxygen, to allow us to catch our breath, and then the lights. The first thing I saw was Pris' face as she floated upside-down, legs hooked through a metal bar. It made me laugh.

"What happened?" She asked.

I smiled crookedly. "The angel of death has passed us over."

"Oh," I heard Mary murmur ironically, "Who's the literate one now?"

Stars passed slowly, scattered across the blackness like a broken string of gems. And Pris and I were in the middle of making love.

Her nails bit into the small of my back. I had the aftertaste of her sweat in my mouth. Lost in the firestorm of emotion and sensation, we struggled against each other, breathing hard and in unity. Until passion played itself out, until our bodies shudderingly spent themselves in satisfaction.

I kissed her hand as I held her after, and she bit me on the shoulder. "Unfair," I whispered, and we both laughed at that and at nothing.

We'd been traveling for two whole days. While practicality blanched at such ineffeciency, my spirit insisted that it was hardly a waste of time. Never before had we been reft of obligations, orders, danger. And now we were free, desperately free. I remember the first morning being shocked to wake in Pris' arms. If a man is born in chains, does he realize they are not a part of himself until they are gone? Would he pine for them, even, if they disappeared? I felt like that man when I woke up, and for the end of that day I felt like I had commited a blasphemy by simply doing nothing for hours.

By the second day I'd had enough of guilt, however, and enough of nothing. I employed my time from the minute I woke in doing all the things I often wished I could do-- with reading at the top of the list.

I am a possession. I could not possess anything myself, technically speaking. Yet I did actually own one thing before we took our flight. It was a little book that was given to me by a very kind stranger.

We were marching through a city, the whole lot of us, for some showy official reason for other. Anyways Jack and Leon and I found time to loiter by a park, artificial people beside fake trees. As we stood there, making stupid jokes and shoving each other, a group of people congregated about fifty feet off. We didn't notice them at first, assuming that the focus of their attention was the shrill-voiced preacher standing up on the base of some bird-dung bespeckled statue. (Pigeons came to the colonies-- oodles of them. Like the rats. These were tough species, and they would be around, I thought, long after people had vanished.) But then we realized that he was pointing straight at us, and as a result everyone was staring.

He didn't like us. That much was very obvious. He had some religious objection to our existence-- humans playing God, etc, etc. As far as I'm concerned, humanity better play God for all its worth-- its the only game people as a whole can play. Creating, procreating-- they're absolutely useless unless they are inventing and making new things. The preacher, however, didn't seem to be of my school of thought. I wanted to tell him not to yell at us about it. It wasn't exactly my fault I existed.

I remember Leon and Jack nudging each other as if debating whether they should give him some hell. I preempted them and walked right on over.

The people huddled back as I advanced, slowly, calmly. Nothing in my step was threatening. It was the fact of me that was a menace. The preacher turned ashy and yowled at me to "keep back, son of Satan." I smiled vapidly at him and waited politely for him to run down on breath, which took a very long time.

"The book you've been quoting... is that it in your hand?" I asked him.

He nodded righteously, holding it up before him like a shield. I took this as an offer.

"Thanks," I said brightly, snatching it from his astonished fingers. "Nice poetry," I remarked, and departed.

The Bible, flawed ravings of decrepit old minds that it was, became my refuge. At first I only skimmed it, to see if it actually said anywhere that replicants were bad. It didn't. It was written before we were even conceived, in the days when humans still enslaved each other to build their civilizations. The Bible seemed all in favor of slavery. Any passage which might have been construed as damning to the Nexus 6 would have to be taken amusingly out of context. Odd, to try and apply ancient yammerings to issues that were all too modern. Knowing how to properly sacrifice a sheep wouldn't do any of us much good if all the sheep were electric.

But after my first reading, I was drawn in by the words and the stories. They were ugly and chaotic tales of hapless men plagued by an unfair God, in which the man whose conduct struck me as most admirable was invariably cast into hell while some craven asskisser was sainted. These stories seemed real to me precisely because they were insane. I related to Lucifer, to Cain, to the prodigal son, and to Isaac nearly sacrificed on the mountaintop. Yet my Bible meant more to me than a series of absurdly amusing tales. It was my only posession, my only secret-- the only thing that wasn't in my files, wasn't issued to me by the army. Did I keep it under my pillow because I feared God? Well, yes-- but only my gods, the men who made me and controlled me.

Thinking these thoughts, I untangled my limbs from Pris'-- she was sleeping again-- and made my way naked over to a computer. Leon and Zorah were still asleep, separately. No matter how much our dimwitted friend chased her, she was way out of his league, that girl, and she knew it. I suspected Jack and Mary were cuddling in the cockpit. It was early and I would be undisturbed as I searched for information. I needed to find the man called Satan.

One of the passengers had left behind a quite good laptop computer in his luggage. It had become my second posession. Actually we had acquired a lot by raiding the passengers' bags, including clothing to call our own. I keyed up the monitor now and got online, and started searching for my genesis.

I knew that the Nexus 6 was manufactured chiefly by the Tyrell Corporation, and that we were the product of the genius of a Doctor Eldon Tyrell. About Tyrell I knew very little, not even whether he was still alive. A quick web search told me swiftly that he was, very much so, though on the greying side. I stared into the photo of his face for a long time, as if looking for... what? Family resembalance? Something of him that I could find in myself. At a glance there was nothing. I frowned and set about searching again, seeking clues. This could be important.

After a time it became obvious to be that doctor Tyrell, of course, was not directly responsible for all aspects of Nexus 6 design. He'd come up with most of the original ideas, but the development of these concepts and the physical design of individuals was obviously the work of other departments. The one thing he did do, however, aside from sitting on top of his moneyheap and feathering his nest, was the brain. Sitting back, satisfied, I flexed my fingers and stared at the screen. That meant I thought like him. Huh. My mouth quirked. Important indeed.

Idleness was getting boring by the morning of the third day. I spent all afternoon learning to play chess using somebody's laptop computer. The first time I played, the program beat me. The second I beat it, and the third, and the fourth. It was quickly tiresome. So I read halfway through someone's virtual library. They had Nietsche and Dante and so I was kept happy for a few more brief hours. Then I had to seek entertainment elsewhere again. The others, with the exception of Pris, were not very good company. Leon was sullen and depressed, like a child sent to his room. Zorah was sarcastic and spent all her time needling Jack, whose fiery temper provided her instant gratification. Mary was not speaking to me. She was still scorning me with all the lofty moral judgment of her pronouncements on the first night of our escape.

By eleven o' four PM, standard galatic time, on the third night, I was as drunk as I'd ever been.

It had started with everyone else sleeping and just me and the shuttle's refrigerator full of vile hard liquors staring each other down. Dubiously I selected a bottle and a shot glass, and went into the cockpit, sitting down at the controls. The amber liquid caught the colored lights of the monitors invitingly. I sighed, poured out a glass, and drained it down. The stuff tasted vile at first, but it burned along my throat and gave my stomach a pleasant turn. Before long I was was guzzling from the bottle.

Sitting at the controls with the blue and green monitor lights glaring at me and the stars blurring before my face, I gripped the guider tightly and pushed mercilessly on the acceleration. The engine was making a sick, pained snarling sound and the readouts were all turning to red. Mary rushed in.

"Roy!" She gasped, and flung herself on me, trying with her frail fingers to pry my hands off the controls. "What in God's name do you think you're doing?"

"Faster," I muttered, my voice slurred. "I want it to go faster."

She released me with a despairing cry. "Oh, Roy! Don't tell me you're drunk!"

"Blessedly, yes," I snapped, feeling a scowl crease my forehead. The room seemed to be warping and I had an inane moment of imagining this was due to some trick of relativity, us nearing the speed of light. It only lasted for a moment, and then I knew with growing rage that it was my out of control weakness. I flung myself on the accelerator. The ship around me convulsed and grumbled like it was about to come apart. Mary gasped and tried again to pull me away. I hung on with all my strength, gritting my teeth as I spoke.

"We-- aren't-- going-- fast-- enough!" I snarled. "We don't have time to waste."

"Roy, you'll kill us all!" She yelled at me.

Must admit: I'm an asshole when I'm tanked, and an idiot too. Know how much? --So much that at the time, when she said it, I didn't care.

"Keep your judgments!" I hissed at her. "Did you learn anything back there at the station, Mary? The weak, who hesitate, die!"

"So do the foolish and reckless," she countered, her eyes flashing. She stamped her foot and looked around desperately. "Sweet Jesus... Jack? Somebody? Help!" Her voice echoed round the cabin, rebounding and attacking me.

"Holy shit, what's going on?" Jack yelled, rushing onto the scene. Leon and Zorah followed, last of all a fragile looking Pris, rubbing the sleep from her eyes. Within seconds Jack and Leon had grabbed me and flung me off the chair, and Pris was at the controls, bringing the ship back into equilibrium; while I, roaring with my anger, tried to stumble to my feet. A detached part of me remarked that some time on this trip I would have to try to get my dignity back before all was swallowed down by blackness.

Waking hung-over was horrible. I decided to keep it a once in a lifetime experience and tried not to think that once might be all I'd get the chance for. No big loss anyway, I thought bitterly. I deciding that drinking was for fools and spent the morning being subjected to Pris' attempts at creating a hang-over cure.

"Seriously," she insisted, swooshing a raw egg around in a glass with a lot of other things that don't bear mentioning. "I fixed this for the admiral loads of times. He always swore it works. Here." She handed me the glass with a tiny smirk.

I sneered at her, took the glass and eyed it dubiously. It looked highly suspect, so I sniffed it too. Pris clicked her tongue in exasperation.

"Come on, Roy, don't be sissy. Just knock it back and you'll feel better, promise."

I sighed and swallowed, grimacing. If the stuff worked for anyone, it was just the power of suggestion, I decided.

Pris looked on expectantly. "Better?" She queried.

I laughed at her. "No." Slipping an arm around her waist, I kissed her until she slid down onto the bed, taking me with her.

"Guys? Guys? Oh, seriously, don't you ever stop it?" Zorah, glancing down our aisle, quickly averted her gaze with a derisive laugh. Pris elbowed me in the stomach, none too gently, and wriggled free of my embraces. I snuck in one last kiss before she hit me in the mouth with a pillow.

"Get your mind out of the gutter, Zorah!" I called laughingly to her. "What is it you want?"

Zorah made a great show of turning around slowly to give us a chance to straighten up. Jack and Leon, playing cards a few rows down, laughed at her display. But I caught Mary's discontented mutter-- "no sense of human decency."

My temper flared, yet I laughed aloud. "I should hope not, Mary," I tossed back at her. "Honestly, would you listen to yourself sometimes?" Shaking my head, I attempted to calm myself and turn back to the issue at hand. "Now, what is it, Zorah?"

"Well, Roy, we're getting close to--" she started.

I couldn't pay attention. I rounded on Mary again. "Seriously, don't you realize how well your self contempt works for them? Don't you know how effectively it keeps you down?"

"Roy--" Zorah interjected.

I made myself turn back to her, disdaining my own lack of self control. "I'm sorry, Zorah. I let myself be too easily distracted. Go right ahead."

She pursed her lips as if to suppress her grin, but it wasn't a smile of contempt, rather one of happiness. A happiness too great to keep down. "Roy," she beamed, "We're nearing Earth. You can see it through the viewports." Trying to preserve her cool, disinterested facade, she nodded towards the window. "Go on."

I wasn't concerned with appearing disinterested. I had already nearly clambered across Pris to look. And there it was, shining-- a cloudy blue green marble, just as the vids showed it, only smudged now with gray and sulfurous yellow. An unhealthy, blotted earth. The place of our origin.

"Home," I murmured, as Leon, Jack, Zorah, Pris and Mary crowded behind me to look. "Just think. Before we were activated and awakened to consciousness, we were manufactured here, and shipped out into the stars. This is our birthplace. The homeland of the Nexus 6."

"And of the human," Mary murmured.

I turned around to look at her, and for once found nothing to argue with in her pronouncement.

That night, as we drifted in space, her earlier words came back to haunt me, mock me, keep away sleep. _'No sense of human decency. . .'_

I tossed and turned on the bed, tormented as if I were lying in a field of nettles. Pris' peaceful form stirred beside me, and she reached out and touched my face, as if to offer comfort. For her sake, I made myself lie still, while sleep continued to run from me.

Human. What was so wonderful about the humans, after all? Why was this the ideal we had to aspire to? From what I knew of human history, which was more than a little and certainly far more than I ought to have been aware of, they were far from perfect. They seemed unable to avoid destroying their surroundings and killing their brothers. Whenever a rare genius arose among them, he or she would be ostracized and disregarded until long after their lifetime was over. Why worship humanity, then?

If there was a standard, I decided, it was not one that only we replicants should aspire to, but also humans themselves. Hard to know what it was, then. But somewhere there had to be a greater goodness, a higher virtue, a certain. . . decency. . . and beyond it, even, a glory.

Pris stirred again beside me and snuggled unconsciously against me, as if trying to slip into my arms. I put them around her, reminded bitter-sweetly of the first time between us, which brought back again, uncomfortably, Mary's words.

It had been rape, unquestionably. I don't pardon myself of this. I can only say on my behalf that, at the time, I literally didn't know that it was wrong. I was different being then, incapable of understanding why I should care about what someone else wanted instead of tending to my own desires. Moreover, "rape" as a crime had not even been defined for me. I don't think I never knew the word. When later I looked in the regulations that the Nexus soldiers were supposed to follow, I found nothing to discourage sexual assault. There was a clause against fighting-- or, more specifically, against doing damage to one another that might render us less functional, less fit for combat. But nothing was there for the sake of so-called morality, justice, or decency-- the rule book was based on epediency. It made me wonder if human morality was all a lie. Yet I had felt remorse for what I did to Pris-- not full blown guilt, but a certain uncomfortableness, that led me to appologize to her later. She'd shrugged and said it happened to her all the time, at the hands of far less attractive men. So began a romance. We were simpler creatures then.

Thinking back to the rule book now, I realized why they hadn't put anything in it just to keep us civilized. It wasn't merely that they couldn't be bothered. It was deliberate. They meant to keep us acting like animals for as long as possible. Thinking of this, rage rose up within me. They tried to deny us what they thought made them superior. They had robbed us of humaness.

But, in the end, was humaness worth having? Or was there something else, beyond that, they hovered sometimes even beyong the homo sapien's reach, something that moved on pure white wings, and graced so few of us?


End file.
